Karl Katzke

As a sysadmin who’s been getting into clustered virtualized hardware stuff, I’m unbelievably jealous of Wolfram Alpha’s custom Dell hardware (note: Youtube video with horrible music, I suggest hitting mute) — it’s a 2u, quad-board, dual-socket, quad-core system. You fit four servers into 2U of space. It’s essentially one of our 1950 or sc1435 virtualization hosts, but in 2u of space with an infiniband backplane.

I wish Dell would make toys like this publicly available. They’ve already done the design and engineering work, and I think there’s a huge market for this type of unit given Dell’s complete and utter failure in the blade market.